Im Prinzip könnt ihr euch alles schenken und ganz runter scrollen und dass was nicht im quote ist lesen und ihr wisst auch alles, dass Zeug dazwischen kann aber nützlich sein:)
Since you will most likely ask yourself "why should I bother to read this text-wall?", here is the answer: it will help you understand how armor/physical EHP (effective hit points) works and thus improve your ability to purchase the correct items and to properly react to items purchased by the opponent. Calculations can be partly skipped if you want to, but I have made sure to only do the most necessary calculations.
- 1 armor does not increase your EHP by 6%
- stacking armor does become less and less efficient indeed after all (cause other things in comparison become more effective)
Since you will most likely ask yourself "why should I bother to read this text-wall?", here is the answer: it will help you understand how armor/physical EHP (effective hit points) works and thus improve your ability to purchase the correct items and to properly react to items purchased by the opponent. Calculations can be partly skipped if you want to, but I have made sure to only do the most necessary calculations.
It's the same old story really, balance of armor and hp is most important, stacking just 1, either hp or armor, is not overly effective. Simply remember the following 2 things:Armor Misconceptions
From a pure subjective and unreflected point of view people have always claimed or had the feeling that stacking armor becomes gradually less effective. Even today it's nothing unusual to meet people who feel this way and this feeling found it's expression on the mechanics pages of PlayDota, which I will quote later on. Already a long time ago however it was established that each additional piece of armor provides the same protection as the previous one. As a consequence the idea of armor stacking becoming less and less effective has been shelved, considered to not be true. Unfortunatelly this is partly a fallacy.
- Armor stacking always provides the same extra protection when it comes to number of attacks required to kill a target -> this is true! (given we talk about the same amounts of armor obviously)
- Armor stacking becomes less and less effective the more you have -> this is true aswell!
How can both be true? How can purchasing multiple Plate Mails become less and less effective when, at the same time, each platemail provides the same protection from numbers of attacks? Well, it depends on what you compare it to/meassure it with, but answering this question and explaining why this matters and how it is expressed in gameplay is the aim of this article.
1. Proof that stacking armor becomes less and less effective
2. Why it matters
3. Evasion compared to armor, supportive argument
1. Proof that stacking armor becomes less and less effective
It looks like people have taken a specific piece of information and repeated it like a mantra. Unfortunately that piece of information is incomplete and people frequently oversimplify what it means. Quoting from playdota:
playdota.com/mechanics/damagearmor
It is generally conceived that armor gets less and less effective the more you have (since the extra damage reduction gets less and less). That a Plate Mail gives you less extra protection from attacks if you already have 20 armor than if you would have only 5. This is false. If one Plate Mail makes the hero survive 3 extra attacks, then 4 Plate Mails will make the hero survive a total of 12 extra attacks before dying. Each Plate Mail gives the same amount of extra protection, which is in this case 3 more attacks before dying.
Every armor point adds an additional 6% of your maximum HP to your EHP.
In order to demonstrate my point I am going to always use the same examples, a hero with 0 armor and 1000 maximum hp which stacks platemails (10 armor each).
Formulas and terminology
- EHP: Effective Hit Points, refers to the amount of damage it takes to set your HP to zero.
- pEHP: phycisal Effective Hit Points, In this article I exclusively refer to physical damage and thus use the term pEHP. pEHP is calculated by: maximum HP * (0.06 * armor value). Example: a 1000 hp hero with 10 armor is 1000 * (0.06*10) = 1600 pEHP
- Initial pEHP = maximum HP combined with the armor the unit already has before we add an additional source of armor
The first Plate Mail adds 600 pEHP to the initial 1000 hit points, this is a 60% increase of your initial EHP. The second platemail adds another 600 pEHP to the previous 1600 intial pEHP. But at the same time this is only a 37.5% increase in pEHP when calculated from the previous pEHP value with 10 armor.
One frequent misconception is that 1 point of armor does increase your EHP by 6%. As shown above that is NOT the case (unless you have 0 armor). Just like written on playdota, 1 armor does not increase your EHP by 6% (since EHP would be hp + armor), it only increases your EHP by 6% of your maximum HP. This is a significant difference.
Generally speaking EHP is the only thing that matters, all damage calculations only take EHP into consideration. From the calculations above we can establish, and what PlayDota does not mention, that the more you stack armor, the less cost-efficient it becomes because we add a smaller proportion of armor to what we already have.
Who cares? Why does it matter that the percentual increase in pEHP when stacking armor/Platemails is lower when it still provides the same number of effective hitpoints? It still increases the number of hits required to kill you just as much as the previous Platemail so it must be just as effective, right? Wrong.
2. Why it matters
In Dota being able to kill a hero, taking someone out of the fight is unbelieveably important because you remove those heroes abilities from the fight, preventing them from dealing damage, preventing them from regenerating or making narrow escapes, focusing down a target before a fight really starts can win you the battle already. A simple example to highlight how the importance/significance of burst to remove a target from the battlefield is expressed in gameplay & balance:
Queen of Pain's Sonic Wave deals 350/475 (530)/600 (725) damage (Aghanims). It has a 135 seconds cooldown, 100/70/40 with Aghanims.
Death Prophet's Crypt Swarm deals 300 damage. It ultimately has a 4 seconds cooldown.
After 8 seconds Crypt Swarm as an ability deals 175 more magical dmg than Sonic Wave with Aghanims and will be up again in 4 more seconds. Even a lvl 3 Sonic Wave without aghanims, which you can only unlock on lvl 16, deals twice the damage of Crypt Swarm but has 135 seconds cd compared to 4 seconds cd once witchcraft is maxed too (around lvl 10). Yet Sonic Wave without a doubt is a much more powerful/impactful ability because bursting something down, setting the pace of a fight, getting an edge over your enemies is one of the most important things to do in battles.
This principle also applies to single target spells or physical damage, if you can remove a target from the equation with little effort, time spent or abilities used then you can much more quickly focus on other targets. Efficiency.
When playing the game it turns out that surviving 6 attacks instead of 3 is significantly better, more effective and more powerful than surviving 10 instead of 7 attacks. Surviving 8 instead of 4 attacks by far eclipses surviving 20 instead of 16 hits because the amount of time you gain to react and thus regenerate/reposition/use abilities again and consequently disrupt the enemy more is all you need to further extend the amount of time you will be alive and capable of contributing. This is where the extra damage reduction becoming less and less is expressed in gameplay.
At the end of the day it's all about cost-efficiency and effectiveness of using your ressources (time, abilities, attacks) in general. Here are a couple of examples of item efficiency or from DotA's history:
3. Evasion compared to armor, supportive argument
This section is here purely to show how armor becomes less effective when stacked.
From Benchbreaker's EHP guide: playdota.com/forums/showthread.php?t=392772
Evasion scales exponentially
It means 30% evasion is more than twice as good as 15% evasion
15% evasion = 1/0.85 = 1.18 -> 18% increase in EHP
30% evasion = 1/0.7 = 1.43 -> 43% increase in EHP
Evasion is a multiplier of your initial pEHP (maximum hp+armor). 25% evasion will simply multiply your pEHP by 33.33% no matter what your pEHP currently is. Let's compare a talisman of evasion (25% evasion) to our previous examples with Plate Mails on a hero with 1000 hp and 0 and 10armor.
What we can observe here is that a Talisman of Evasion is weak compared to one simple Plate Mail in I), 267 effective hit points less. However the exact same amount of evasion as in I) suddenly provides almost the same pEHP increase the additional Plate Mails provides in II), the difference now is only 66.67 effective hit points.
Being a flat multiplier, evasion catches up to stacking armor and at a certain point (13.5 armor) is going to surpasses armor stacking in increasing your EHP. Unlike armor, which scales linearly, evasion scales exponentionally.
- 1 armor does not increase your EHP by 6%
- stacking armor does become less and less efficient indeed after all (cause other things in comparison become more effective)
Happiness, more or less, it's just a change in me, something in my liberty.
